We just rolled out an update to Freebase.com, and the biggest change is to our topic pages.

We’ve struggled for some time with how to present useful information to casual visitors to our website, as well as providing a powerful editing interface for logged-in contributors. With this release, we’re splitting the topic page into separate “viewing” and “editing” pages.

The “viewing” page, which is the first thing you’d see if you came in via a Google search, for instance, presents important information in a fact box at the top of the page:

It also calls out important facts, like the albums a musical artist has recorded, in a more graphical, visually appealling way:

Going forward, we will be customising certain common types of topic pages so they look even better.

If you want to edit the information on the page, you can hit the “Add more facts” button on the right hand side of the page.

The “editing” page is much the same as our old topic page, with a few benefits for the Freebase geek crowd. The main one in this release is that we’re showing you all the keys for the topic right on the page, so you don’t have to go to the Explore view to find them. More contributor- and developer-friendly features will be added in future releases.

Note that once you’re on the “editing” page, when you click from topic to topic you’ll stay in edit mode. You need to click the “Back to Browse” button (top right) to return to the “viewing” page. Searches and saved views will also take you to the “viewing” page. We’re working on optimising this flow, and would appreciate any feedback you have.

Other changes in this release

You probably already heard (because we emailed everyone about this change to our service) that we’re now sending email notifications in response to certain events occuring on Freebase, such as discussion posts. Well, this release we’ve added notifications if someone’s following you.

Another change is that we’re limiting the use of base subdomains like basename.freebase.com to the base homepage. Pages within bases will use canonical names like http://www.freebase.com/base/basename/... This is because it confuses search engines when there are two pages with the same name. The subdomain names will continue to redirect to the canonical ones, and your base homepage’s name does not change at all, so this should be a low impact change for base owners.